Simulation of elastic filaments interacting with a viscous pulsatile flow

Motivated by the need to understand the motion of ruptured atherosclerosis plaque fragments in a flowing blood, we simulated flexible elastic filaments interacting with a viscous pulsatile flow in two dimensions using the immersed boundary method. Our simulations show that (1) a flexible horizontal filament positioned perpendicularly to the flow is a stable configuration and (2) hydrodynamical forces prevent adhesion of filaments but mutual interaction of vortical fields yields clustering of filaments into groups that may be called “aggregation”.